Looking through the history of someone who has made a lot of unconstructive edits on Wikipedia, I see they edited the article on this man and changed a single word:
His blood-soaked body was hanged from a traffic light.
His blood-soaked body was hung from a traffic light.
My rule of thumb has always been that people are hanged, things are hung, but this sentence has me scratching my head because the man in question wasn’t hanged to death; he was already dead when his body was hoisted up on the traffic light.
Does a person have to be alive for the word “hanged” to be used? Is a dead body that is strung up hanged or hung?
“Hanged” refers to the execution technique – “to suspend by the neck until dead.” People, dead or alive, can be hung – “to fasten to some elevated point without support from below.”
I swear I remember it differently. When I went to school, hung needed a helper verb, as in “the stockings were hung.” Hang didn’t, as in “he hanged the stockings.” Being human didn’t change it- “they hanged him” or “he was hung by the neck” were both OK.
Does anyone else remember learning that or am I misremembering?
Is “hung” wrong? If I say, “The convict was taken to the gallows and hung,” is that actually wrong, or is it simply, perhaps, not the more preferred way of expressing it.
(Whew! Dodged a trap! I started to write “The most preferred way,” but someone would likely have said not to use “best” when speaking of only two options!)
I used “hung” recently in that way, and my b.i.l. insisted it was wrong. I thought both were right when speaking of executing someone.
The Usage Note under “hang” in American Heritage Dictionary:
Usage Note: Hanged, as a past tense and a past participle of hang, is used in the sense of “to put to death by hanging,” as in Frontier courts hanged many a prisoner after a summary trial. A majority of the Usage Panel objects to hung used in this sense. In all other senses of the word, hung is the preferred form as past tense and past participle, as in I hung my child’s picture above my desk.
Yeah, sorry, I’d must agree with you BIL. I’d know what you meant if you said that, but I’d still picture someone dangling from their midrif from the gallows, rather than being executed. If you meant to say he was executed you should use “hanged”.
The sentence “The convict was taken to the gallows and hung” sounds like there should be something after it: “The convict was taken to the gallows and hung upside down”, or “The convict was taken to the gallows and hung from a butcher’s hook like a piece of meat”.
There’s an intuitive reason, and a logical reason. The intuitive reason is that if you say “The batter flew out”, it sounds like he started flapping his arms and went up into the air. The logical reason is that it comes from the noun phrase “a fly ball”, not from the verb “to fly”. A general principle in English (and apparently in all languages, according to Steven Pinker), is that when an irregular verb is used as part of an idiom where it is no longer used as a verb, and the idiom as a whole is converted back into a verb, it becomes regular.
